


Wolves

by historymiss



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Gen, dragon age: asunder writing challenge entry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-26
Updated: 2012-01-26
Packaged: 2017-10-30 04:03:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/327524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historymiss/pseuds/historymiss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An old templar does his duty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wolves

It is easy to fall into a routine, and Ned has been living this one for so long he is worn into it, like a hole in a stone or old shoes shaped to the feet inside them. He gets up, stretches creakily, has his breakfast, and leaves to check on the houses scattered along the mountainside he calls home. Before he leaves, Ned enters the tiny stone chapel attached to his house, kneels, and asks Andraste for her blessing.

Andraste, as usual, does not have much to say. Ned stands up, dusts off his knees, picks up his stick and goes out on patrol. Not many live out here on the Frostback Mountains, and the villages are few and far between. But still, the scattered farms need a Templar, and some small token of the Maker’s presence, if He can see them at all under the shadow of the high mountains. Once upon a time, Ned had dreamed of a proper posting- something exciting, not tending a dusty bronze statue at the arse end of the world- but now he has grown used to the quiet rhythms of this life and, in truth, cannot imagine another.

There are just a few ports of call on Ned’s walk, long though it is; Stonepeak Farm, bare and lonely in the highest pasture for miles about, the Witch and Warrior, Ned’s local inn, and a few scattered huts inhabited by those who value solitude over safety.

As he walks, Ned hears the cry of a wolf somewhere below, and hastens his pace. The winter has been hard: it may be that the wolves will come up the mountains this year. Such a thing hasn’t happened since his predecessor’s time: sometimes when he was well into his cups, old Darien would sometimes speak of standing in the dark, sword in hand, waiting for the wolves to come.

Ned finishes his patrol at the same place he always does: Hild’s cottage, just a mile away from his own chapel, where she waits at the gate, pretending to garden.

“Heard wolves in the valley.” Ned says, without preamble, for oftentimes Hild is the only person he speaks to all day, and their conversations run into one months-long exchange. He is grateful for her presence, for since Darien died he is sure that he would start speaking to the rocks and trees and sky- and already has, if he is honest.

Hild nods, clipping away the dead growth on the bush of Andraste’s Tears that grows by her gate.

"Sounded like something else to me, Ned.” she says carefully. Nobody here calls Ned Ser Aedwyn, for the same reason that he wears his own clothes and carries no blade. “Sounded like something bad.”

Ned has heard rumours, carried up from Denerim with his monthly allowance (for the maintenance of a sword that he has never used in anger, the polishing of armour he has not worn in years) but he has discounted them, for what does that matter up here, where the mountains trap time’s flow and hold them in the same pattern that they have always been in? The Maker himself could fly down on the back of a dragon, Ned thinks, and nobody around here would ever know, for there is hardly anybody to notice.

“Probably just wolves.” He shrugs, tossing off the greater fear. Hild gathers up the dead twigs in her hands and turns to go inside.

“Probably.”

  
The travellers come to the chapel the next day. Explorers, apparently, charting some of the entrances the dwarves left to their abandoned thaigs. All collapsed now, of course, and inaccessible, but this is among the least of their concerns, for one of their number is dead.

He is not dead when they drag him there, faces white and hands bloody, but it does not take long. Ned performs what small medicine he can, but within an hour the young man’s life slips away.

“Blessed is the Maker.” Ned can’t tear his eyes away from the giant rents torn in the man’s flesh, the raw meat of him bloody and exposed. There are wolves in the valley, no doubt, and they are getting desperate, though the man’s friends talk of monsters instead, distraught and hysterical. “Blessed are those who sit at Your right hand in glory.”

The young man is interred next to Darien. Ned suspects that the old man is glad of the company.

That night, Ned takes his armour and his sword and follows the path down the mountain. It takes him to the pass up from the valley: if the wolves come up (and they most assuredly will), they will do it here. The Templar adjusts his shield, half-remembering forms and tactics, and stands ready. It doesn’t take long before yellow eyes appear in the darkness, and dark shapes that are most decidedly not wolves start to move up the pass.

He is a funny kind of champion, and a cursed old one too, but he is all that the Maker has seen fit to provide and Ned prays to Andraste that he will somehow be enough.

Andraste does not send a miracle, but she does send Hild, who walks down the pass, staff in hand. They exchange a look: an acknowledgement of something that, in truth, Ned has always suspected but never wanted to confirm, for what harm could she do out here? What could the Maker really see, under the shadow of these mountains?

They stand in the dark, and wait for the monsters to come.


End file.
